One of the technology buzzwords that has fallen in and out of favor over the years is 'convergence'; of the many forms this concept has taken, one was that the various household electronics devices would learn to talk to one another, and possibly even merge into a single information appliance. As video and audio components gained programmability, and as PCs have gotten better at handling audio and video, each has contended for the role of Grand Unified Media Device.

My money has always been on a particular dark horse candidate: the game console. It has the audio and video capabilities of the best PCs, and at its heart it's a computer every bit as powerful as the desktop PC; but it has the economies of scale, ease of use, and broad appeal of a non-technical consumer device like a VCR or DVD player.

My expectations are coming a step closer to being fulfilled.

Look again at the PSX and its specs. Its guts remain the PS2, the world's most popular game player. But around that core, Sony is going to wrap a 120 GB hard drive, a recordable DVD RW/R drive, a TV tuner, an Ethernet port and a Memory Stick slot. It will also feature USB 2.0 support and a slot to plug in Sony's upcoming Gameboy competitor, the PSP portable gaming system.

The price? Speculation ranges from $500 at the high end (the cost of those components today) to $299 at the bottom. I'll bet it's closer to the latter, even if Sony has to lose money on every box for a year or so.

I'm not going to go so far as to endorse this product. I haven't actually used a game console since the last time I moved, and didn't bother to reconnect my old Sega Genesis; I don't have the expertise to judge the bona fides of this product. But I will be severely tempted to pick up this one, or its inevitable competitors from Nintendo or Microsoft. (Yes, I'm a Linux user and open source advocate; but in this market, Microsoft is actually more open than its competitiors.)

The End of the PC?

Yet, the more you study the PSX announcement, the more you sense that something important is happening here, all of it camouflaged by the low-key nature of the announcement. Don't worry, folks, just another game player for your kids — except, of course, once you put it on top of your TV, why do you need a DVD player or a VCR? Or Tivo? Or your PC?

Look at those specs again, and the price. Now tell me again: Why do you need your personal computer?

Well, unless there are versions of Apache, Perl, and Python for the console, as well as a decent spreadsheet, I won't be retiring my PCs anytime soon. And reading dense text (like, I dunno, say weblogs) on an NTSC TV screen makes my eyes hurts just to think about it. But I take the writer's point. This ain't no Pong, and it's not even just a state-of-the-art game console; it's trying to be something much more ambitious.

From a marketing standpoint, it's an ideal way of testing the concept, with a mature product (the PS2) as its base, and with a successor product (the PS3) in the pipeline. Information gathered from marketing the PS2.5 will be used to fine-tune the PS3 strategy: stick with the pure game console, go full-bore with an advanced PS2.5-style console, or tweak the concept by adding features consumers want, or deleting features that they don't care about. Sony's PS3 planners are doing with the PS2 line what Microsoft normally does with its competitors: let them take all the risks with a new product concept, let them make all the mistakes, and then follow up with a product based on the information gleaned from the market's reaction.

I'll be following this sector a lot more closely in the future.